


Marry me

by i_gaze_at_scully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Fluff, Pre-Relationship, Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 15:28:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18803113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_gaze_at_scully/pseuds/i_gaze_at_scully
Summary: Scully takes Mulder's proposal seriously in Chinga. Mulder is an impulsive yet patient suitor, in the words of @scapegrace75-blog on tumblr (:





	Marry me

“Scully?”

“Yes?”

“Marry me.” 

He could almost hear her eyes rolling. 

“I was hoping for something a little more helpful.”

“Well, you know, short of looking for a lady wearing a pointy hat riding a broomstick, I think you pretty much got it covered there.” 

“Thanks anyway.”  _Click._

He was trying, he really was. To give her the space she needs, the room to breathe. To grieve. 

But he was a piping hot mess without her, absolutely hopeless, and he knew it. The minute she’d turned her phone off for the weekend, he stared blankly at his own hand as though  _it_  had been cut off and not just their line of communication. And then she’d called out of the blue and he’d been watching porn. Albeit ironically, not seriously.  _Alien Probe_  was too absurd  _not_  to rent. He might as well have been watching a nature documentary. But he wasn’t. He was sitting on his couch alone watching porn in the middle of the day and the sound of her voice was a godsend. When she started talking about the occult, really talking about it, showing off that big beautiful brain of hers and defying all of his expectations (as always), well.

He asked her to marry him. 

That she hung up immediately after was no surprise. He got off the couch and went to the computer to do something, anything, to help her out. He promised himself he wouldn’t call until she called him back, but then she didn’t call him back. He told himself to give her space, but he felt every inch of it like nails in a coffin. He told himself if she needed his help, she’d ask, and then he laughed out loud and picked up the phone. 

He got to the office and played out their reunion in his head a few dozen times before she actually walked through the door. She’d come in and gush about the case, or she’d come in and tell him off for pushing, or she’d come in and poke fun at him for his weekend habits. Or maybe a pencil would fall in her eye and then he’d sure look like a dumbass. He kept throwing them anyway, thinking about what her face would look like when she saw them. 

When she comes back, one of his imaginings comes partially true as a pencil thuds on his head, but it doesn’t matter. Because she walks in the door and he feels …home. Instantaneously. 

At the end of the day, the fleeting winter light long gone from their murky window, he stands on his desk to clear the pencils out of the ceiling. Scully tells him a story about a girl and the sea. 

“Maine has a kind of raw power to it I’ve never seen anywhere else,” she says, her voice far away. He looks down for a moment and she’s staring off over her shoulder. “When you descend from the mountains to the shore, scramble down the cliff face and hop between the jagged rocks, the change is palpable. The air you breathe breathes you. The sea doesn’t roar, because it doesn’t have to. You can stand astride any rock and it has been touched by the waves. You look out onto a rough and unforgiving sea as the salt scrubs you clean and know that it is the most beautiful thing in the world.” 

He pauses with a handful of pencils and his eyes are drawn to her.

“I think you’d like it a lot,” she finishes, turning her head back towards him. 

“Scully?” He asks, carefully stepping down from the desk.

“Yes?”

“Marry me.” He says it low, slow, deliberate. She doesn’t roll her eyes, but an eyebrow arches. A twitch at the corner of her lips could be read for a smile, but he wouldn’t bet on it. She chuffs and looks back into the distance, back to the sea. 

“We could move to Maine,” he continues, as spellbound as he’d been the first time he’d asked. He watches these events unfold from somewhere outside his body, can’t imagine ever doing them himself. But he does. He crouches down beside her and taps two fingers gently on her forearm. “You could show me the sea, and the docks. You could teach me to sail.” 

“Mulder, this isn’t funny,” she says summarily, finding his eyes so he knows she means it. 

“I’m not being flippant, Scully.” He wants her to know he means it, too. That if she’d take him seriously, that if she’d take him, he’d marry her. 

“You’re crazy,” she says, and he smiles. 

“You haven’t said no.” Somehow it doesn’t seem crazy at all. 

“That doesn’t mean yes.”

“But you know I’m serious at least?” He asks, more of a statement, a promise. He wraps his hands around hers on her lap. For someone who had given this momentous decision no forethought, who’d never considered it until twenty-four hours ago, he’s never been more sure. But that’s how it’d always been with Scully.

She nods, and it’s enough for now. 

The next weekend, he drives to Connecticut and picks up the ring. Calls Scully on the way and tells her about it, describes it in detail. She doesn’t hang up. He keeps it in his night stand, opens and closes the box sometimes while they’re on the phone. Asks sometimes if she’ll marry him now, and she laughs and redirects and chastises but she never says no. 

One day, she will say yes. And it won’t be because of imminent death or danger, it won’t have anything to do with anyone but them. One day, and one day soon, he will marry Dana Katherine Scully. 

He wants to believe. 


End file.
